This project was a collaboration between Mariame Kaba and the Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) to digitize Kaba’s walking tour. Our hope is that the site can be used as an educational tool and means for young people and activists to learn about the history of slavery & resistance in NYC. The website was created using Mapbox, QGIS, and Glitch.
You can contact us at erc@barnard.edu for any questions and/or feedback on the project!
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect and most recently Survived & Punished. Mariame is also a co-organizer of the Just Practice Collaborative, a training and mentoring group focused on sustaining a community of practitioners that provide community-based accountability and support structures for all parties involved with incidents and patterns of sexual, domestic, relationship, and intimate community violence. She is on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Nation Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry and more. She runs Prison Culture blog. Mariame’s work has been recognized with several honors and awards.
Fatima Koli is the Associate Director of the ERC, where she provides direct and programmatic support for the faculty’s efforts to integrate empirical techniques and methods throughout the Barnard curriculum. Through this role, she focuses on developing inclusive pedagogy for teaching empirical reasoning, that is both appreciative of and critical of data. A Master’s Data Science graduate from Columbia, she studies at the intersection of data science, public policy, and cartography. Her interests lie in the ethics of data analysis and racial justice, particularly through the lens of abolition.
Claire Goldberg graduated from Columbia in 2021 with a major in Urban Studies. They are passionate about community organizing and using data science and mapping to support activists in the fight to dismantle the carceral state and build a more just world.
Anna Wu is a senior at Barnard College studying Economics and a English. She is interested in the applying data science to public sector economics issues, particularly education and immigration.
The Empirical Reasoning Center (ERC) at Barnard College helps faculty, students, and alumnae engage critically with data - quantitative, qualitative and spatial. Through workshops and staffed drop-in hours, the ERC provides the Barnard community with empirical research support and technology training, ranging from Excel, to survey creation, to geographic information systems (GIS). They also partner with community organizations and nonprofits to provide data related support services and host events focused on the role of data in the fight for justice.